Personalized Learning with iPad to Empower Interactivity and Student Thinking

Webinar Date: January 23,2014

View Transcription

Learning is intensely personal to every student. In order to learn effectively, students’ initial conceptions and prior knowledge must be engaged to ensure they can make sense of things for themselves. At the same time, they want and need their own ideas to be heard in every lesson. A powerful way to personalize learning and empower student thinking is to use the iPad, in combination with Intelligent Adaptive Learning™ technology. The technology enables innovative and interactive lessons that personalize the learning path for each student, and provide them with real-time feedback as they learn – anytime, anywhere – with the iPad. Join Dr. Tim Hudson as he shows how to use the iPad to empower students to bring their own uniquely personal problem-solving strategies to the learning experience.

LORI: Welcome to today’s webinar, ‘Personalized Learning with the iPad to Empower Interactivity and Student Thinking’, brought to you by Simple K12. My name is Lori and I am here with Tim Hudson, and we are so excited to have all of you here with us today. Now we do have lots of great webinars coming up, hope that you will join us. You can register for those upcoming sessions including those days of learning inside of the Teacher Learning Community. Now this webinar is brought to you free today thanks to our sponsor. DreamBox Learning motivates all levels of learners to achieve math proficiency. The result is increased achievement, deep understanding and lifelong confidence in math. Please take a minute to visit our sponsor at the end of our webinar today.

Now, if you’re joining us live, I just sent out a tweet from our Twitter account. Feel free to re-tweet to your followers and invite them to attend today’s session that is free and open to the public. Be sure to include this link as well as the #sk12 when you send out your tweet. Once again, we do have a backchannel discussion open for this session. The TitanPad is a great place for you all as attendees to take notes and chat with one another. I went ahead and posted that link in the chat area of GoToWebinar, and I’ll go ahead and send that out again in just a moment.

Now we will have some time for some live Q&A at the end of our session with Tim. Please feel free to submit your questions through that questions box at GoToWebinar. Now it does tend to auto-collapse, but if you click on that orange arrow, the question box will open and you can type in your question.

Now a little bit about our presenter. Dr. Tim Hudson is the Senior Director of Curriculum Design for DreamBox Learning. He is a learning innovator and education leader who frequently writes and speaks about the goals of learning and educational strategies. Now prior to joining DreamBox, Tim spent over 10 years working in public schools, first as a high school math teacher and then the K-12 Math Curriculum Coordinator for the Parkway School District in St. Louis, Missouri. Tim, it is a pleasure to be with you today.

TH: Hey. Thanks so much. Lori. It’s fun to be here.

LORI: I will go ahead and pass the screen to you, so you should see that little pop-up.

TH: Yes. And let’s see, are you seeing outer space?

LORI: I am.

TH: All right, here we go. So thank you very much Lori for setting everything up, and thank you to everyone who’s here today to sharing the learning about personalized learning and to learn more about what I’m about to share about personalized learning with the iPad. And the key things that we’re looking at are how can we empower student thinking, how can we use the iPad as a way to interact with powerful ideas. And before I get specifically to what happens on the iPad, you see my Twitter handle there. And the introduction, I taught high school Math. I was a K12 math coordinator. So it’s great to be here today.

To make sure we agree a little bit more on terms before we get started about what personalized learning means, I want to share a framework so that we’re on the same page here. I worked for many years with Grant Wiggins, and he’s one of the co-authors of ‘Schooling by Design’ and ‘Understanding by Design’, if you’re familiar with that work. If you’re not, it’s great information about how to write great curriculum and really give your school and district a purposeful mission. And they point out — this is back in 2007, they wrote this — that too often contemporary school reform efforts focused on various means, what’s our new structure, what’s our new schedule, what’s our new PD. And of course, educators often feel that sort of the pendulum swinging back and forth, new fads and things. I would also throw on their personalized learning, blended learning, flipped classrooms, iPads, hardware. We tend to think of these as — these are means. These are strategies. And Wiggins and Mctighe rightly point out, these reforms are the fuel for school improvement. If there’s new technology, we should take a look at it and figure out how we can best meet the needs of all students. We should definitely try flipped classrooms, blended learning, personalized learning. These are all important things, but they’re strategies. We can’t lose sight of the goal, of the ends, that the goal, the destination is improved learning for kids. So we just want to say our goal isn’t to have a school of personalized learning. Our goal is to cause better learning. And in order to do that, we believe to use technology that we believe, that we’re going to make things more personal for students.

So I’ve got this little matrix here that I’ll talk about a little bit over the next half hour that you have schooling, which is the structures, the schedules, the systems that the adults set up. And then you have learning, which is really the pedagogy with the students. Okay, what happens in this lesson now? How do we engage each individual mind? And you can either have a very personalized relational approach or impersonal sort of industrial approach. So you have an industrial schooling model, which actually, we probably argue, is kind of where we’re at in the United States. And there’s something as industrial learning approaches too, which I’ll get in to.

Then you have personalized schooling and personalized learning. So I wanted to throw this out there at the start. When I talk about personalized learning, it’s about the pedagogy. It’s about what happens if a student engages with a lesson. So sort of the question for any student, what should this student be learning, doing, thinking about tomorrow as a unique individual? Now, impersonal industrial schooling, that sort of approach, the very first question asked is, what’s her birth date? Because as an industrial system, it’s far more — yeah, it’s based on when you were born and that’s how the system has been set up. By contrast, if we were doing more personalized relational schooling, the first question would be, well, what does she know? What is she interested in? Where could she be learning? That’s a key thing about blended learning. You have high school students sitting in a lecture at school at 7:20 in the morning wondering, “Why do I really have to be right here right now to just listen to someone explain something to me?”

So one of the things we do at DreamBox is providing robust detailed reporting for parents and teachers about progress students are making. And this is an actual classroom report. It was a snapshot taken during the first week of first grade, and these were students who had used DreamBox in kindergarten. And what you see is very different places in terms of how much kindergarten math content they understood and how much first grade math content they understood. So when we personalize learning and using technologies, whether it be iPads and DreamBox on the iPad or DreamBox on the desktop or other software programs that provide these data, we need to first look at the data perhaps more so, definitely more so, than the birth date of the student if we’re going to be more personalized. And you can see here there are three or four students who were almost finished with first grade Math content, and that’s in the first week of first grade. So how personalized is there schooling going to be over the course of this next year if we already have some evidence and data that they know what the whole curriculum is going to be? You also see there the students who have made the most progress in DreamBox have done so in very different amounts of time, one student taking 51 hours. Jayce took 28 hours to get to where he was at and Marianne, only 16 hours. And those are three very different time amounts to get to almost completed with first grade curriculum. And in personalized learning, we need to account for the different amount of time that students might need to accomplish learning goals.

So another way, let me give little more — flesh this out a little bit more, that with a more impersonal industrial school approach, the policies and the structures are all about economy, efficiency, scale, fixed location, schedule, path and pace, wherein more personalized schooling, we design structures and schedules based around unique students and their needs where the location and the schedule are going to be strategic. They’re going to be varied in terms of path and pace as well. The industrial impersonal learning I mentioned is kind of that traditional lesson paradigm. It’s mass instruction. It’s I’m going to teach. We’re going to practice and then you’re going to test, where students are sitting and getting the teachers ideas. And I don’t really think that’s as personal as learning should be, because we have to engage every single mind. And so when I talk about personalized learning with iPads, I’m talking about empowering learning experiences where students engage in critical thinking, creativity, exploration, where the students are the ones who are thinking and doing using their own intuitive ideas, using their own personal ideas, that for every lesson, students have prior knowledge, thoughts, ideas about something that we need to activate. Otherwise, it’s not going to be terribly personal.

So as an example, this is a DreamBox lesson helping students understand the relationship between multiplication, partial products, even a little bit of distributive property where we give students small arrays that you see over there on the right in orange, and they have to choose pieces that are going to, together, represent at array that’s 12×11. And there are six choices. There are options of things to drag over there. Kids can make sense of it by — you see the little circle. You see the circle here. That’s sort of where the student’s finger would be tapping on the iPad, and you get an idea for what they’re thinking based on which pieces they choose to use to compose their answer, to compose that final array.

One question I like to ask adults when I talk with them is about what they remember from Math when they were in school. And a lot of times, it resembles what’s captured in this quote from the book ‘Teaching What Matters Most’ published in 2001. I highly recommend that book along with ‘Schooling by Design’ and ‘Understanding by Design’. And you have this 5th grade teacher from New York saying, “You know what? Great people were teaching me. They were funny. They were caring, but they didn’t really teach me good math because every class, every year was, ‘Get out your homework. Go over the homework. Here’s the new set of exercises. Here’s how to do them. Get started. I’ll be around for eight years. And that really resonates with people. That’s how my experience was for many years in math, and most adults had similar experiences. And I would say that’s impersonal learning. And as you scale that down to early childhood, early elementary, pre-school, kindergarten, it’s not how pre-school teachers in kindergarten and teachers go about instructing in any content any area, not just Math.

As a pretty humorous way to look at that sort of impersonal approach in away is if you go to YouTube, there’s this group called Kid Snippets, and they do bunch of videos where they record audio of young children having conversations and then they have adults act it out and then dub the audio over. So if you go check that video out later today, it’ll be the funniest two minutes that you’ve had in a while. You have a teacher trying to explain what ten take away one is, how ten take away one is nine. The teacher starts up at the board, and there’s the student sort of counting on his fingers. And throughout the whole video, by the end of it, the student isn’t getting it because it’s a seven year old explaining it to a five year old. And then the teacher just basically reaches wit’s end by the end of it. It’s a sort of intense ten minus one is nine kind of moment that you see there in the picture. So check that out a little bit later.

And what this really elicits is another quote from ‘Schooling by Design’ that if we want students to really understand, then as educators, we can’t start from the idea that we can just give students understanding. We have to engineer learning experiences so that students seek for themselves the power of an idea for making sense of things. If you’re a first grader who’s just learning math and someone says to you, “Oh, well, one tens, that’s just the same thing ten ones,” which is a key understanding around place value, but for me to say that that sounds crazy. One tens is the same as ten ones is a linguistic kind of riddle. So in DreamBox, what we do is we use virtual manipulatives. Here’s the example of a ten frame where students are able to — as you see here, the student is dragging a whole group of ten. We ask them to build this number up here. Sometimes we show them the number. Sometimes we just have them to match the picture. And they’re allowed to choose one, two, three, five or ten counters from this bin over here, and we’re actually able to capture ideas that they’re having based on the counters that they pick. So with this manipulative, it’s very clear to students, after they use it for a while. That one group of ten, which is what this student has here, is the same thing as ten ones. And to compose this number nine, you can drag over 10 and then you can actually remove one counter to build nine. So students are getting the idea, as you would see in that video, that ten take away one is nine. It’s actually how we teach the same thing that’s in that Kid Snippets video. But the key is that it’s personal, because students have a choice. They have a task that’s manageable, and we’re able to capture information with our adaptive learning platform about how students are thinking about the problems.

So in ‘Understanding by Design’, when you’re planning backwards, that stage three piece where you plan learning experiences and instruction, there’s a big difference between instruction which is kind of that Kid Snippets video, kind of that get our your homework, go over the homework, here’s a new set of exercises, where the learning experience is more like what I just showed you in the two DreamBox examples where we present students with a task and then empower them to interact with the manipulatives to make sense of things and to think for themselves. To put it in another way, the sort of common teaching cycle is this whole class, small group instruction — and this is born out of an industrial kind of schooling model. This is why the approach kind of happens. Then there’s independent practice followed by a whole classes assessment, where sort of one of two things happen, either, one, we’re going to use those data about that whole class assessment to do some — we’re going to use the data informatively to instruct what we do next in class, or we’re going to use the data summatively and move on to the next unit. And that’s an instructional approach. That’s content delivery.

Another way of saying that is let me show you how to do X. Now you go do X. And you independently do X, and this could be anything from adding two numbers to underlining the predicate, those sorts of things. And well, maybe you need to be shown X again, that we think the problem with learning is that we need to repeat ourselves or talk slower or louder, and that’s not at all the case. It’s students need to be thinking more about. And then, of course, the other option, you do know it. You do know X. And the key question, who is doing the thinking here? And it’s not — frequently, it’s not the student. Michael Fullan, in a report from this past July, talked about technology-enabled innovations and how, as you see from this quote, they have this problem with pedagogy and outcomes where, there in the orange, most often, digital learning content introduces concepts with a video and follows with a series of exercises and tests and then some digital innovations are just tools that let teachers do the exact same thing in a digital format. And that’s not really changing or improving the learning.

Here, that same cycle on an iPad is not going to — it doesn’t have a pedagogical change where we’re going to start with a video then go to independent worksheet problems, followed by digitized test items. And then maybe if it’s adaptive and responsive, it will just send you back to watch the video again or something. There’s no pedagogical change, and Fuller points that out. This might improve some modernization, has improved functionality, but it’s not changing the pedagogical practice of the teachers and schools, and I would add, or learning programs and platforms. Sean Junkins, who’s an educator who’s pretty big on Twitter, there’s his Twitter handle there, made this great graphic. Trees and iPads, neither of them were made to be a worksheet. And at DreamBox, we believe that wholeheartedly, that we need to have better experiences not just digitized worksheets.

If you are in a position to be evaluating digital learning tools, the SAMR Model is pretty helpful where it describes and gives some vocabulary to say, “Okay, is technology acting as a direct tool substitute? Is it augmenting the tool, giving us some functional improvement? Or is the technology allowing significant task redesign?” Both examples of what I showed you in DreamBox, those are things where we have redesigned tasks that are happening in classrooms but we’re modifying them and making them more valuable as a result of technology, because students as individuals can interact with those ideas in a way that’s very difficult. It’s not impossible to do with actual plastic manipulatives, certainly to capture the data or for a teacher to get around to see what each student is thinking. And then the R stands for redefinition where we’re using technology to actually create new tasks that were previously inconceivable. And in a minute, I’ll show you how we do some of those at DreamBox to try to create things in the digital world that can’t actually exist in the physical world to help students make sense of mathematics. And the two differences there are there are enhancements and there’s transformation.

Now I would add here to this framework I showed you earlier that if you’re doing blended learning initiatives, to try to make that distinction too, is it blended schooling where we’re just making a commitment to more personalized learning and the student experience with technology. But also, we have to think about blended learning in terms of the pedagogy and really, that just sort of means where are we going to use technology. You can probably find software that fits into any of those quadrants. In the lower left hand quadrant, a lot of learning management systems or grading programs were built for a system where it’s just A, B, C, D and percentages as supposed to maybe a more standards-based grading approach that some schools are using where the software was not built to personalize based on standards but rather to have an industrial sort of grading underlying the way that teachers can enter in data about student learning. And similarly, you can find plenty of iPad content and digital content that has this teach-practice-test idea. At DreamBox, we aspire to make sure when students are using technology that the pedagogy matches with empowering learning experiences. Another talented teacher on Twitter sent this a couple of months back that it’s not about replacing textbooks with iPads but replacing textbooks with experiences and questions. And I couldn’t agree more, and that’s what we strive to do at DreamBox. It’s about better digital experiences.

So one of our — another one of our lessons for older students is helping students understand the real number line and the idea of magnitude and scale, where in this task, we ask students to place a pin as close to 2,909 as possible. And what you would you see if this were a lesson starting from the very beginning, down here at the bottom, that’s actually the first thing that we gave students. We gave them a number line that only showed 2,500 and 3,000 and they had to use a magnifying glass either at 10 times or a hundred times to zoom in on a certain portion of that number line where they thought 2909 was. Kind of like The Price Is Right game, I think, where the yodeler kind of matches this up. Actually, I don’t know if it’s the yodeler but if you watch The Price Is Right, you probably know what I mean. I can’t remember the name of that game. So then when they zoomed in on this blue area down here at the bottom, it showed them from 2,880 to 2,980, and students had to use their number sense to estimate where 2,909 was. And then they actually kind of got lucky. The 2,909 ended up being right here in the middle. It just as easily could have been just off the side a little bit. So that’s a digital experience that can’t exist with plastic manipulatives. And the whole reason we designed that way is to personalize learning where at DreamBox, we view it like this. We need students to engage with and make sense of a situation or a context both in class or in a digital environment. Specifically, at DreamBox, it’s in a digital environment. Then what we need is not for students just to go practice something they’ve been shown. We need students to bring their own intuition and ideas to that task, to that problem so that we know what they’re thinking and how we can help them think better.

At DreamBox, we give specific instant, custom feedback, which is what all teachers in the classroom aspire to do and class sizes and a diverse range of needs of each learner makes that really impossible to give students specific instant, custom feedback every day in every lesson. And then our intelligent adaptive engine differentiates and adapts to give students new experiences to engage with, maybe additional scaffolding. And then of course, the goal is for students, when they go off of DreamBox, stop using it on the iPad, they’re able to transfer their knowledge into conversations in their classroom and certainly, on any pens and paper work that they’re going for their class. And this is the approach that’s engineered for realizations, doing back to that ‘Schooling by Design’ quote. We know we can’t give understandings, but we can develop them by engineering learning experiences in a specific way.

So using that same tool, the ten frames, later on, we give students nine counters and ask them to add three, and those are the green counters. And as a student adds three individual green counters, what they’re really finding out and coming to understand is that nine plus three is the same thing as a group of ten plus two. So it’s not about getting the answer. It’s about understanding relationships and understanding more than just the answer. We also have second graders, first and second graders doing this lesson, where they’re developing an idea of equivalence. Is this expression equal to or not equal to this expression. And as they use these manipulatives, very friendly for a touch environment on the iPad, that they see, “Oh, well, this isn’t even a number. This is a variable. But I know that N is equal to N, so I can go ahead and using that equivalence then go from there. Say, oh, 75 is the same as,” that sort of thing. They’re the ones doing the thinking. Later on, for older students, as they learn to multiply and work with the open array, understand the relationship between rectangle area and multiplication, variable to compose. You saw earlier, the orange rectangle, the orange arrays. Well, in this one, they create the arrays in size, whatever size they want, and they’re able to see the results of their thinking. And no two students are going to really solve that problem alike when they first engage in the lesson.

So we believe that in order to personalize learning, students need feedback that’s right in the moment based on their own intuitive strategies, the kinds of mistakes they’re making, the efficiency of the strategies they’re using, the scaffolding that they need, the response time, how long it takes them to think through a problem. Some students do need longer time and our adaptive engine sort of accounts for that. So you see in the lower right hand corner, for example, 68 plus 54, and we give students the opportunity to build that solution on the number line. Because when they get to high school geometry, it was really hard for students to add and subtract on the coordinate plane because they didn’t have nearly enough experience with the number line and making sense of how the distance and the number line are related.

We also here — we’re coming up on about five minutes left and I want to make sure there’s time for Q&A, so I’ll show you two last things. Similar to those, the snap blocks that I’ve showed you, where students were setting N equals to N, when it gets to fraction, we have students work with money and time as context for making sense of fractions. And they have to build one half, and they can use a 50-cent piece for that. And then they have to build one half a second way, so they could use two quarters or five times, getting to understand those equivalent relationships while they’re learning fractions.

And then for fun, of course, we also have some fluency games. Here, a student has to choose two numbers that add up to negative 5.1. And we’ve used the miniature golf context, where students can see one the number line the numbers that they’ve picked, and we sometimes throw obstacles in there as well. So kind of like with that other number line, the students have to think, “Well, it this is -5.1 and this is 0, then I can’t put anywhere between 2 and 2.5, 3.5, something like that.” But they have to think strategically and decide which of these numbers they can’t use. We allow students to personalize their avatar. Every student using DreamBox has a very different screen within just few minutes of playing, because we’re differentiating for students in real time. And for older students and grades three and up, we make recommendations for lessons that they could do. They could also practice things, change their wallpaper, so a little bit of engagement elements there.

So real briefly, if you don’t know anything about DreamBox — I’ll get to the Q&A I believe right after this slide. We have 1,300 rigorous lessons in our curriculum, Pre-K to grade six adaptive lessons. I should say 1,300 rigorous lessons, my apologies for that, my typo. It’s convenient, flexible and accessible on the iPad or desktop. We offer that real-time reporting for parents, teachers and administrators. We support the common core and the standards for mathematical practice. We also have reporting for some of the Canadian provinces as well as for Virginia and Texas. The virtual manipulatives really make the most of that iPad touch surface, where kids can bring their own personal ideas in a very engaging interactive environment. We’re currently all in 50 states and internationally. And then the nice thing is when students are working on the iPad, if they have an iPad at home, they log out and they go to school. If there aren’t iPads at school, they can use the desktop there to pick up right where they left off. The three elements that we combine at DreamBox to support student success as rigorous math, that motivating environment and then that intelligent adaptive learning engine that really responds to students and gives them feedback based on how they’re thinking, because how they’re thinking about an answer is just as important as the answer.

So with that, I will turn it to the Q&A and turn it back over to Lori.

LORI: Great, Tim. Thank you so much for a wonderful presentation. I’ll give you just a couple of moments to catch your breath, and then we’ll take some Q&A from our attendees. So if you do have a question for Tim, please feel free to submit your questions now through that questions box at GoToWebinar. This webinar has been brought to you free today thanks to our sponsor. DreamBox Learning is a deeply personalized math learning experience that differentiates content, pace and sequence for the highest levels of student achievement. With over 1,300 lessons, DreamBox motivates and guides all levels of learners to persist, progress and achieve math proficiency. The result is increased achievement, deep understanding and lifelong confidence in math. Thank you so much, Tim.

I also want to take a moment to pop back into the Teacher Learning Community, share with you where you can find some additional resources. If you’re wanting to learn more, a great place to start, underneath our Courses tab, our link for Differentiated Learning. Some fabulous resources there, some on-demand webinar recordings as well as our link for iPads and mobile learning. I know that Tim had mentioned the SAMR model during his presentation. One of my favorite features inside of the Teacher Learning Community is the keyword search bar up at the top. If you do a keyword search for a particular item, now we’ll go ahead and change this dropdown to webinar. So if you wanted to learn more about the SAMR model and then we’ll click on that green search button, it would take you to the presentations that we have inside of the Teacher Learning Community specific to that topic, so another great feature of the Teacher Learning Community, if you’re looking for some additional resources and wanting to learn more.

Okay, Tim, let me go ahead and get your contact information up here on my screen. We have a question that came in from Christine. Now is the DreamBox pricing, is it per student, per class, per school? How do you all work that out?

TH: Yeah, we do have — both per school and per student pricing. Per student, it’s $25 for a whole year of 24/7 access, home and school. And then for — I believe for an entire school, one building site license, it’s $7,000 for the year. So the breakpoint is somewhere up around 300 when it would more sense to get the building license. One quick thing that I mentioned to add — I failed to mention at the beginning because there are — I did focus quite a bit on DreamBox in math specific. And of course, in personalized learning, there are other content areas. And what I found is in mathematics, it sometimes, people have — either they really liked math or they really didn’t. It’s a nice sort of one context for talking about personalization, because it’s maybe the content area where students feel less, least likely to get their own ideas in math. Or if you’re having a discussion in history about perspective and how people might have felt or how you felt about a specific passage in a piece of literature in English language arts, students do feel like their personal ideas are heard and valued a little more than in mathematics. And so I did want to add that when you’re looking for iPad applications that are personalized in other content areas, really the — look at the SAMR model for sure, because that’s a great filter for deciding is what I’m doing a really good use of the technology. And another thing to look for is what empowers students to interact with ideas, what empowers students to think for themselves. And any iPad app that allows creativity in responding to test the teachers generate, those are the ones that you’re going to be looking for.

LORI: Okay, great. Thank you so much, Tim. I do have a question that came in from Dennis. He said, it seems very much students are learning in the early grade using this game-like format. How well would it work in the upper grades where this game-like structure with theme ideal for learning computer science, especially computer code?

TH: Oh, yeah. There’s a lot going on with computer programming. I remember when I took my first computer programming class in college, I thought, “Wow, this just opened my eyes to just a whole lot of what’s possible.” Our platform, as a learning platform, could certainly support content that would teach students any subject area. We have focused on mathematics for various reasons but yeah, computer science. And the key there is you have to give students a task, give them tools to write a program. And the great thing about programming is the feedback is right there. If the program crashes, you know there’s some glitch somewhere. So the feedback for computer programming is always great. I hope that answered the question.

LORI: Great. Thank you so much, Tim. Now did you mention — you might have mentioned this in your presentation, if the DreamBox Learning, does it support ELL students as well?

TH: Yeah, we work with many, many schools who have students with ELL needs, and it’s kind of interesting. Some teachers we talked to are really glad that it has, at the early grades only — there’s nothing to read. It’s only verbal, and a lot of schools tend to think that it’s additional support to help learn English as well. So we try to make language not a barrier for students using DreamBox.

LORI: Okay, great. I just have — I think we have time for one more question here.

TH: Sure.

LORI: Regarding the reporting, now you said there are specific reports for teachers, administrators and parents. Can you elaborate on the types of reports that can be generated using DreamBox Learning?

TH: Sure. We have a standards report that shows every common core or text standard. We have text standards in there as well. So you can pick a specific student and see which specific standard that student is working on, what they have completed already. We also have — the one screenshot that I’ve showed was sort of a more global summary to see how much progress through a grade level a student has completed. And then another report that we have empowers teachers to — they’re going to be teaching long division next week. They can go into a DreamBox report and find out at the click of a single button which students have already done long division in DreamBox, which students are working on it and which students haven’t started it yet so that you can plan more strategic groupings and make — really, make your classroom more personalized, because if a student already knows how to do long division, that lesson is not going to be personalized for them.

LORI: Great, Tim. Thank you so much again for a wonderful presentation. It’s been a pleasure being here with you today. I want to thank you again for offering that free trial to all of our attendees today. I’ll go ahead and send that link out again. And I do appreciate being here with you today. It was a great presentation. I look forward to being here with you again for some future sessions.

Blogs

Since 1987, March has been Women’s History Month, an occasion to bring awareness and reflection to the extraordinary accomplishments of women and their influence in shaping our country and our collective future. Women have reached great heights as entrepreneurs, leaders […]

Thoughts on Closing Opportunity Gaps in STEM The Austin weather certainly didn’t cooperate, but Day 3 at SXSWedu was nonetheless an another one for the books. Panels on closing opportunity gaps and the discussion of equity in STEM really stuck with us. Keynote speaker […]

Testimonials

We have to keep moving forward in our classes, but there are just instances when kids have missed something along the way—either through an absence, or just not “getting it.” With DreamBox, I can have fifth grade students that don’t understand place value review and understand at their own pace. DreamBox helps to fill those educational gaps at the exact time and place that each child needs it … certainly something that I cannot provide for every student during our classroom time

Amy Bolting, Fifth Grade Math TeacherAlvin Elementary School

I teach an intervention class of students on the autism spectrum who look forward to playing DreamBox every day. As visual learners, being able to physically move the virtual manipulatives around on the screen has allowed them to see and really understand math concepts in a whole new way. After just 6 months using DreamBox last year, I saw even my most math resistant students' move from below basic on the CMA to basic or proficient.